dri-dispatch

You dispatch a new initiative; you do not become its DRI. This skill sets up a fresh, isolated checkout, registers the initiative in the global workspace, and launches a background /dri session that owns it end-to-end. The current session stays free.

Use this when:

• A human wants to kick off an initiative without tying up this session.
• A DRI (or any session) surfaces separable work — a discovery bead that is really its own feature, infra/tooling work, anything that would balloon the current scope. Do NOT absorb it; dispatch it here. The current initiative stays focused; the new one gets its own DRI, checkout, team, and PR.

For becoming the DRI in this session, use /agent-teams:dri instead.

The ateam tool

ateam is on PATH — it ships as a prebuilt binary in the plugin's bin/ (auto-added to PATH; installed/verified by /setup-agent-teams). Call it as bare ateam everywhere this document shows ateam. One allowlist entry covers all subcommands: Bash(ateam:*).

🚨 CARDINAL RULE. The GLOBAL workspace (reached ONLY via ateam) holds ONLY initiative-tracking beads and role memories. Registering an initiative is the ONE write you make there, and ateam register is the only sanctioned way to do it — NEVER bd -C <global> create. All work beads (the planner's decomposition, feature/task/discovery beads) live in the PROJECT repo and are created by the background DRI and its team, not here.

Steps

1. Preflight

• Verify ateam is on PATH: run ateam ws. If it errors or is not found, tell the human to run /setup-agent-teams and stop.
• Run ateam audit. It must report clean before you add anything.

2. Scope the initiative

The LLM's job here is judgment only — everything mechanical is handled by ateam dispatch in step 3.

• Problem statement. Take it from the invocation. If none was given, ask the human — this is the single load-bearing input.
• Full context block. Capture the human's complete framing: constraints, background, relevant decisions already made, and any clarifying-question seeds the background DRI should answer before planning. This mirrors the old "CONTEXT FROM ERIC" block. WHY: the background DRI has no human attached — it recovers all context from the initiative bead via ateam show <id>. A bare one-liner starves its clarify phase; a rich context block lets it proceed with the right assumptions. Write the context to a temp file (e.g. /tmp/ateam-ctx-<slug>.txt) using the Write tool. If there is genuinely no additional context, skip the file and omit --body-file.
• Target repo. The initiative may target a repo OTHER than the one this dispatcher session is sitting in — do not blindly assume cwd. Identify the target directory the human means (explicit in the invocation if they named one, otherwise the current directory). If that yields a single unambiguous repo, pass nothing (dispatch defaults to cwd). Pass --repo <abs-path> ONLY when you are not confident: cwd is not inside any repo, the problem clearly refers to a different project you cannot locate, or more than one repo plausibly fits.
• Base branch. Default is the repo's detected default branch (dispatch auto-detects). Pass --base-branch <b> only when the human implies a non-default base or there is genuine ambiguity — a wrong base is expensive to unwind.

3. Dispatch

Run a single call. Everything deterministic (slugify, git worktree add, initiative register, background DRI launch) is handled inside ateam dispatch:

ateam dispatch --problem "<one-line problem statement>" --body-file <tmpfile> [--repo <abs-path>] [--base-branch <branch>]

--problem is the one-line title. --body-file carries the full context block you wrote in step 2 (schema lines come first automatically; the context is appended after them). Omit --body-file only when there is truly no additional context to pass.

dispatch fail-fasts (non-zero exit) on: not-a-git-repo, empty slug, worktree-slug collision, or a --body-file path that cannot be read. It never prompts. On success it prints:

initiative_id: <id>
worktree: <abs-path>
slug: <slug>
base_branch: <branch>

🚨 CARDINAL RULE. ateam dispatch performs the ONE write to the global workspace (initiative registration via the same register path). All work beads (planner's decomposition, feature/task/discovery beads) live in the PROJECT repo and are created by the background DRI and its team, not here.

4. Report and hand off

Relay the output dispatch printed. Tell the human:

• The initiative id and the worktree path (from dispatch output).
• How to watch and control it:

claude agents                   # list background sessions
claude logs <session-id>        # recent output without attaching
claude attach <session-id>      # open it in this terminal
claude stop <session-id>        # abort early OR reap a finished idle session

When the background DRI finishes, it ends its turn and the session stays idle — it does NOT self-stop. It appears as idle in claude agents; use claude stop <session-id> to stop it when you are done with it.

Any human gate the background DRI parks on surfaces through ateam human-list and the /initiatives dashboard — so a needed decision is discoverable without tailing logs.

Permissions

A backgrounded DRI has no human attached to answer prompts, so it runs with --permission-mode bypassPermissions (what ateam dispatch sets when launching the background DRI). This requires a one-time interactive acceptance of bypass mode on the machine first. A bypass-mode DRI edits a real repo unattended — only dispatch one for well-scoped work, and confirm with the human first when the initiative touches sensitive tooling or infrastructure.

Reference: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-view